Brand vs performance marketing statistics at a glance
| Category | Statistic | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Recommended split | At least 60% of budget belongs in brand building media and 40% in sales activation, in largely consumer categories (2013) | IPA Databank via Thinkbox, 2013 |
| Recommended split | In B2B the same authors put the balance at 50/50 brand building and sales activation (2019) | LinkedIn B2B Institute, 2019 |
| Real split | 57% of marketing budget sits behind performance channels (September 2025) | Adobe and MMA Global, September 2025 |
| Real split | Only 19% of marketers describe their strategy as performance led (2025) | Adobe and MMA Global, 2025 |
| Real split | 55% of CMOs put 60% or more of budget into long term brand building, down from 59% (2025) | NielsenIQ CMO Outlook, 2025 |
| Long vs short | Upper funnel tactics are 60% more effective long term and 25% less effective short term (2023) | Analytic Partners, 2023 |
| Long vs short | Moving from performance focused to balanced lifts revenue ROI by 25% to 100% (January 2025) | WARC, The Multiplier Effect, January 2025 |
| Brand on performance | About 30% of paid search is driven by brand and upper funnel marketing (2023) | Analytic Partners, 2023 |
| B2B | 95% of B2B customers are out of market at any one time (2021) | Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, 2021 |
| Real split | 42% of advertisers expected their 2025 media mix to move to performance, 34% to branding (November 2024) | WFA and Ebiquity, November 2024 |
| Silos | Two thirds of marketers run siloed brand and performance budgets (2026) | WARC Multiplier Playbook, 2026 |
What budget split between brand and performance does the evidence recommend?
Les Binet and Peter Field recommend at least 60% of budget in brand building media and 40% in sales activation, a 2013 rule drawn from IPA Effectiveness Databank cases covering 700+ brands across 80 categories and 30 years. Those cases are dominated by consumer advertising, so 60/40 is a B2C benchmark, not a universal one.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| At least 60% of budget belongs in brand building media, 40% in activation. The 2013 split comes from IPA Databank cases spanning 30 years, 700+ brands and 80+ categories, most of them consumer. | Binet and Field, IPA Databank via Thinkbox, 2013 |
| Long term investment delivers double the profit of a short term approach, per the same 2013 analysis. Long term means three years or more, short term under one year. | IPA Databank via Thinkbox, 2013 |
| In B2B, Binet and Field's 2019 work with the LinkedIn B2B Institute puts the balance at 50/50, from IPA Databank B2B cases covering 1998 to 2018. | LinkedIn B2B Institute, 2019 |
| Analytic Partners advises at least 50% of budget to brand and no more than 50% to performance, in its 2023 ROI Genome analysis. | Analytic Partners, 2023 |
The 60/40 rule is thirteen years old and still the number most marketers quote, which tells you how little new evidence exists at that scale. Mark it DATED in a deck and name the category it came from. The two figures closer to B2B, the LinkedIn B2B Institute's 50/50 and the Analytic Partners 50% floor, both land at half the budget. Nobody has published a model where performance takes the larger share.
The reason 60/40 survives is not nostalgia, it is that nothing has replaced it at that sample size. I use it as a direction, not a target. If you are at 43% brand and your category is B2B software with a nine month sales cycle, the honest planning question is whether you can defend moving three points a year, not whether you can hit 60 next quarter.
How do marketers really split brand and performance budgets in 2026?
Marketers put 57% of budget behind performance channels in 2025, according to Adobe and MMA Global, while only 19% of the same marketers call their strategy performance led.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 57% of marketing budget sits behind performance channels, from a September 2025 survey of 389 senior marketers globally. Marketing Week does not label the remaining 43% as brand. | Adobe and MMA Global via Marketing Week, September 2025 |
| Only 19% of marketers called their strategy performance led in 2025, against 42% balanced, 28% experience led and 15% brand led. | Adobe and MMA Global, 2025 |
| 14.9% of brand side marketers said their organisation focuses solely on brand marketing and 8.6% said performance was their main focus, in Marketing Week's Language of Effectiveness survey of 1,610 marketers (August 2022). Mark it DATED. | Marketing Week, August 2022 |
| 27.6% ran brand skewed budgets, 23.7% performance skewed and 22.1% an even split, in the same 2022 survey. | Marketing Week, August 2022 |
| 34% of those 2022 respondents said performance marketing is easier to justify because it is more measurable. | Marketing Week, August 2022 |
| 42% of advertisers expected their 2025 mix to move toward performance media, against 34% toward branding (WFA and Ebiquity Media Budgets 2025, November 2024). | WFA and Ebiquity, November 2024 |
| 54% of the 1,400 marketers in Nielsen's 2025 Annual Marketing Report planned to cut ad spending that year. | Nielsen, 2025 |
| 48% of North American marketers weight revenue growth and brand awareness equally (2025). | Nielsen, 2025 |
The 57% against 19% mismatch is the most useful pair of numbers here. Most marketers are performance marketers by accumulation rather than conviction: a channel added here, a retargeting line renewed there, and three years later the media plan has inverted the rule everyone still quotes.
Nobody sits in a planning meeting and decides to run a 57/43 performance-first budget. It happens because every individual reallocation has a spreadsheet behind it and the brand line has a story. If you want the split back, you need to make the brand line boring and measurable, which is why the measurement section below matters more than the philosophy.
Is brand budget growing or shrinking in 2026?
Brand budgets are shrinking slowly and executive support is shrinking twice as fast, according to NielsenIQ's 2025 CMO Outlook: the share of CMOs putting 60% or more into long term brand fell from 59% to 55%, while CEO and CFO belief fell from 80% to 69%.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| Only 55% of marketing leaders put 60% or more of budget into long term brand building in 2025, down four points from 59%. | NielsenIQ CMO Outlook, 2025 |
| 69% of CMOs say their CEO and CFO support long term brand investment in 2025, an 11 point slide from 80%. | NielsenIQ CMO Outlook, 2025 |
| 74% of CMOs face more scrutiny to prove marketing ROI in 2026, and 83% still call their brand a commercial asset. | NielsenIQ via EMARKETER, 2026 |
Those two NielsenIQ declines are not the same size, and the difference is the story. Brand budgets fell 6.8% in relative terms while C-suite belief fell 13.8%, so permission goes before the money does. Budgets follow belief by about a year in most planning cycles, which makes 2027 the number to watch.
Read the 83% and the 69% together. Most CMOs still call the brand a commercial asset, and most of their CEOs no longer act like it is one. That is not a marketing problem, it is a translation problem, and it gets solved with a model that shows brand equity inside the revenue line rather than next to it.
How do long term brand effects compare with short term performance effects?
Analytic Partners found in 2023 that upper funnel tactics are 60% more effective over the long term than lower funnel tactics and only 25% less effective in the short term, a trade of 2.4 units of future return for every unit of immediate return given up.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| Brand marketing outperforms performance marketing 80% of the time, across 750+ brands and 45 countries (2023). | Analytic Partners, 2023 |
| Upper funnel tactics are 60% more effective over the long term than lower funnel tactics and only 25% less effective in the short term (2023). | Analytic Partners, 2023 |
| Shifting from a performance focused approach to a balanced one lifts revenue ROI by 25% to 100%, in WARC's January 2025 report with Analytic Partners, BERA, Prophet and System1. | WARC, The Multiplier Effect, January 2025 |
| 28% of sales come from the brand equity that media spend builds, from Kantar's LIFT ROI database (2025). | Kantar, 2025 |
| 81% of marketers say a mix of short and long term results is the most important measure of campaign return (Kantar Media Reactions, over 1,000 senior marketers, 2025). | Kantar, 2025 |
| 7% of marketers call short term return the most important measure, yet 16% measure short term results only (2025). | Kantar, 2025 |
The WARC range is wide because it pools models from Analytic Partners, BERA, Prophet and System1 across very different categories. That width is a warning about your starting point: a business already at 50% brand sits near the bottom, one at 20% brand near the top. The lift measures how unbalanced you are now, not the word brand.
The 25% short term cost is the number I would put in front of a CFO, not the 60% long term gain. Finance people do not distrust the upside, they distrust the bill, and 25 cents of deferred return on every euro moved is a bill you can plan around. Say the cost first and the argument changes tone.
Does brand building make performance marketing cheaper?
Yes, and the clearest evidence is Analytic Partners' 2023 finding that about 30% of paid search is driven by and directly attributable to brand and upper funnel marketing. A third of what performance reports as its own work was paid for elsewhere.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| About 30% of paid search is driven by, and directly attributable to, other forms of brand and upper funnel marketing (2023). | Analytic Partners, 2023 |
| Last click and simplistic attribution metrics overstate the role of clickable activity by 2 to 10 times on average (2023). | Analytic Partners, 2023 |
| Consumer brands that optimally execute Kantar's predisposition accelerator hold nine times the volume share, twice the average selling price and four times the likelihood of growing share, from 6.5 billion data points analysed in May 2024. | Kantar, May 2024 |
The 2 to 10 times overstatement explains most bad budget decisions here. If last click inflates your paid search return threefold, and 30% of what is left came from brand activity, then the channel that looks safest in the dashboard is the one you understand least. Measurement and allocation are one problem, which is why marketing attribution statistics belong next to this page.
I have never seen a brand budget win an argument against a last click dashboard on the dashboard's own terms. The move that works is smaller: pick one quarter, hold brand flat in one market and cut it in another, and let the paid search cost per acquisition tell the story. Geo tests cost less than a rebrand and they settle this question in about ten weeks.
What does the 95:5 rule mean for B2B budget splits?
The 95:5 rule, from Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute in 2021, says 95% of B2B buyers are not in the market at any one time, which is why the B2B optimum sits at 50/50 rather than the consumer 60/40.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 95% of B2B buyers are not in the market for many goods and services at any one time, from 2021 research with Professor John Dawes. Mark it DATED. | Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, 2021 |
| 96% of B2B marketers expected to see the main effect of their ad campaigns within two weeks, in the LinkedIn study published alongside the 2021 rule. | LinkedIn B2B Institute, 2021 |
| The B2B Effectiveness Code, published in 2021, evaluated 435 B2B campaigns from the WARC effectiveness database covering 2010 to 2021. | LinkedIn B2B Institute, 2021 |
Put the 95% and the 96% side by side and you have the whole B2B problem in two numbers from 2021: almost nobody is buying this fortnight, and almost every marketer expects results within one. The 435 campaign sample behind the B2B Effectiveness Code is small next to the IPA Databank, and still the biggest structured look at B2B effectiveness published.
The 95:5 rule gets quoted as a reason to spend more on brand. Used honestly, it is a reason to change what you measure. If 95% of the audience cannot buy now, then a campaign judged on this quarter's pipeline is being graded on the 5% and charged for the 100%. Fix the scorecard first, then argue about the split.
Why do brand and performance budgets stay in separate silos?
Two thirds of marketers run siloed brand and performance budgets and roughly half have entirely separate teams, according to WARC's 2026 Multiplier Playbook, while only 8% say their teams understand what integrated advertising takes.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| Two thirds of marketers have siloed brand and performance budgets, and roughly half run entirely separate teams (2026). | WARC Multiplier Playbook, 2026 |
| Only 8% of marketers agree their teams understand what integrated advertising needs (2026). | WARC Multiplier Playbook, 2026 |
| 67% of marketers say the C-suite recognises the importance of brand, but only 19% see brand equity as a driver of business outcomes (2026). | WARC Multiplier Playbook, 2026 |
| 85% of marketers are confident they can measure return on investment, but only 32% measure it holistically across traditional and digital (October 2025). | Nielsen Marketing ROI Blueprint, October 2025 |
| 46.9% of US marketers plan to invest more in marketing mix modelling, 36.2% more in incrementality testing (July 2025). | EMARKETER and TransUnion, 2025 |
| Fewer than 3% of advertisers are fully confident they can separate short term performance from long term brand impact, from 71 senior leaders covering $40bn of ad spend (July 2026). | WFA and Ebiquity, July 2026 |
| Two thirds of brand owners are behind on paid media measurement, and only 15% say effectiveness evidence is the primary driver of how budgets are set (July 2026). | WFA and Ebiquity, July 2026 |
| 80% of those advertisers already run marketing mix modelling and brand lift studies, and 75% expect more than half of their budget allocation decisions to be measurement led within three years (July 2026). | WFA and Ebiquity, July 2026 |
| 70% of marketers report a disconnected understanding of effectiveness inside their business, in Marketing Week's Language of Effectiveness 2026 (June 2026). | Marketing Week, June 2026 |
| Just over 25% of marketers use a shared language for effectiveness with the rest of the business (June 2026). | Marketing Week, June 2026 |
The gap between 67% and 19% is where brand budgets die. Senior teams accept that brand matters in the abstract and decline to model it as a cause of revenue, so when the quarter tightens it is the line with no equation attached. The 46.9% moving to marketing mix modelling is the hopeful number here, because mixed models price a brand effect and a click in the same currency. The same tension runs through digital marketing vs traditional marketing statistics.
Silos are not a culture problem, they are an incentive problem. When the performance lead is paid on cost per acquisition and the brand lead is paid on awareness, integration costs both of them something. Change one number in each bonus, usually a shared blended acquisition cost, and the teams merge themselves within two quarters.
How we calculated the original numbers
Four figures here do not appear anywhere else. Here is the arithmetic, so you can check it or swap the inputs.
- 17 percentage points: the gap between the recommended and the real brand share. Binet and Field recommend at least 60% of budget in brand building media (IPA Databank 2013, via Thinkbox). Adobe and MMA Global measured 57% going to performance in September 2025, leaving 43%. 60 minus 43 = 17 points. Relatively, 43 / 60 = 0.717, so the non-performance budget runs about 28% below the recommended brand level. Marketing Week does not call that 43% brand spend and the 60% benchmark is a consumer one, so read this as direction of travel, not accounting.
- 53% against 43%: the average recommendation versus the measured reality. Three bodies publish a number: Binet and Field at 60% for consumer categories, the LinkedIn B2B Institute at 50% for B2B, Analytic Partners with a 50% floor. Their unweighted average is (60 + 50 + 50) / 3 = 53%. Against the 43% left after performance, the gap narrows to 10 points. That is the fairer comparison for a mixed portfolio, and the one I would use with a finance team.
- 2.4 to 1: the trade when money moves from performance to brand. Analytic Partners found in 2023 that upper funnel tactics are 60% more effective long term and 25% less effective short term. 60 / 25 = 2.4. Every unit of immediate return given up buys 2.4 units of long term return, if your business resembles the average of the 750 brands in that dataset.
- 2.0 times: how much faster executive belief is falling than brand budgets. NielsenIQ's 2025 CMO Outlook shows CEO and CFO support for long term brand falling from 80% to 69%, a relative drop of 13.8%. The share of CMOs allocating 60% or more to brand fell from 59% to 55%, a relative drop of 6.8%. 13.8 / 6.8 = 2.0. Permission goes about twice as fast as money, which is what a budget cut looks like a year before it happens.
What the 2026 numbers add up to
The argument is settled and the budgets have not moved. Every body that has measured this at scale lands on brand taking roughly half the money or more: the IPA Databank in 2013, Analytic Partners in 2023, Kantar in 2024, the WARC coalition in 2025. What marketers run leaves 43% for everything outside performance. That is a debate about quarters, not about evidence.
Attribution is the mechanism, not the excuse. Thirty percent of paid search traced back to brand, and last click overstating clickable work by 2 to 10 times, explain why the split drifts. Performance gets credit for demand brand created, so performance gets the next euro, so brand creates less demand next year. That loop runs for about three years before anyone sees it in the acquisition cost.
2027 is where the damage shows. C-suite support for brand fell 11 points in a year while budgets fell four, and belief leads spend. If that NielsenIQ line keeps falling, the budget line follows in 2027. The cheapest paid search in 2028 belongs to whoever kept spending on brand in 2026.
FAQ
What is the 60/40 rule in marketing?
Les Binet and Peter Field's 60/40 rule says at least 60% of budget should go to brand building media and 40% to sales activation, based on IPA Effectiveness Databank cases covering 700+ brands across 80 categories and 30 years. The rule dates to 2013 and the cases behind it are largely consumer, so mark it DATED and name the category. In B2B the same authors put the balance at 50/50 (LinkedIn B2B Institute, 2019).
What percentage of marketing budget goes to performance marketing?
57% of marketing budget sits behind performance channels, according to Adobe and MMA Global's September 2025 survey of 389 senior marketers published by Marketing Week. That leaves 43% for everything else, which is 17 percentage points below the 60% brand share Binet and Field recommend for consumer categories, or roughly 28% under it.
Is brand marketing better than performance marketing?
Brand marketing outperformed performance marketing 80% of the time in Analytic Partners' 2023 ROI Genome analysis of 750+ brands across 45 countries. Upper funnel tactics were 60% more effective long term and only 25% less effective short term. The useful answer is that the two are not substitutes: WARC's January 2025 Multiplier Effect report found moving from a performance focused plan to a balanced one lifts revenue ROI by 25% to 100%.
How much does brand building improve performance marketing?
About 30% of paid search is driven by and directly attributable to brand and upper funnel marketing, according to Analytic Partners in 2023. Kantar's May 2024 analysis of 6.5 billion data points found consumer brands that optimally execute predisposition hold nine times the volume share and twice the average selling price, the same effect further upstream.
What is the 95:5 rule in B2B marketing?
The 95:5 rule says 95% of B2B buyers are not in the market for a product at any one time, from Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute in 2021. The LinkedIn B2B Institute paired it with a survey finding that 96% of B2B marketers expected the main effect of their campaigns within two weeks, which is the mismatch the rule exists to correct.
Are brand budgets shrinking in 2026?
Yes, slowly. 55% of marketing leaders allocate 60% or more of budget to long term brand building, down from 59% a year earlier, and 69% say their CEO and CFO support long term brand investment, down from 80% (NielsenIQ CMO Outlook, 2025). Executive belief is falling about twice as fast as the budgets themselves.
Sources
- Binet and Field, The Long and the Short of It, via Thinkbox (IPA 2013; Thinkbox chart page December 2012)
- LinkedIn B2B Institute, 5 Principles of Growth in B2B Marketing (2019)
- LinkedIn B2B Institute, WARC and Lions, The B2B Effectiveness Code (October 2021)
- LinkedIn B2B Institute, The 95-5 Rule (2021)
- Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, The 95:5 rule (2021)
- Analytic Partners, Brand marketing drives sales and ROI (2023)
- WARC, The Multiplier Effect (January 2025)
- WARC, The Multiplier Playbook 2026 (May 2026)
- Marketing Week, Adobe and MMA Global budget study (September 2025)
- Nielsen, Marketing ROI Blueprint (October 2025)
- Marketing Dive, NielsenIQ CMO Outlook coverage (2025)
- EMARKETER, FAQ on brand marketing (2026)
- Kantar, Blueprint for Brand Growth, 6.5 billion datapoints (May 2024)
- Marketing Week, Language of Effectiveness, brand versus performance (August 2022)
- Marketing Week, Language of Effectiveness 2026, disconnected effectiveness (June 2026)
- WFA and Ebiquity, Media Budgets 2025 (November 2024)
- WFA and Ebiquity, Paid Media Effectiveness Handbook (July 2026)
- Nielsen, 2025 Annual Marketing Report (2025)
- Kantar, Walk the talk, Media Reactions and LIFT ROI (2025)
Methodology. Numbers were collected in September 2026 and checked against the original publisher's page, report or press release, never against a statistics roundup. Vendor claims without a stated sample or method were excluded. Figures older than 24 months are marked DATED here and in the source data: IPA Databank (2013), Binet and Field B2B (2019), LinkedIn and Ehrenberg-Bass 95:5 (2021), Analytic Partners ROI Genome (2023), Kantar Blueprint (2024) and Marketing Week Language of Effectiveness (2022). Where a primary report sits behind a paywall, the publisher's summary page is cited. Full stat list with sources: `research/brand-vs-performance-marketing-statistics-stats.tsv`. See the full statistics hub for related pages. Last updated 20 September 2026.